"Kali Wave"

Pan

Artists:

London-based producer Lee Gamble works in compact spaces, picking up tiny snatches of noise and weaving whole tracks around them. "Kali Wave" is taken from an EP titled Kuang, which provides a ghostly preview of his forthcoming September album, KOCH. The overall sound pulls on elements that have been permeating through the techno underground for years at this point—piles of distortion, skinny beats, a sampler perma-jammed on the "spooky" setting.

Gamble takes a house-y piano riff as his starting point, but it's purposefully rinsed of all joy. Instead, everything here is just left to echo around his well-built world, bringing to mind ghost clubs and crumbling glitter balls, positioning "Kali Wave" as a spectral remnant of better times. Its strength is in its inward-looking facade, which may seem slight at first, but slowly creates a beautifully introspective atmosphere over repeat plays.